JazzNet III arrives!

We have recently received delivery of the third generation JazzNet
machines. These comprise of multiple 8-processor towers, each node
housing a single 400 MHz Pentium II system based on the Intel SE440BX
motheboard, 128 MB of memory (using a 100 MHz SDRAM memory bus)
and a local hard disk of 6.4 GBytes. Fast ethernet hubs comprise
the initial configuration, with plans to upgrade to Myrinet.

Specs for each JazzNet III tower

3.2 Gflops (peak)

8 processors

1 GB memory

50 GB disk

$14,000

Pictured above are three towers, representing an agregate performance
of 9.6 Glops, 3 GB of memory, 150 GB of disk, for less than $45,000.

The latency of the fast ethernet network is about 80us. We have measured
point-to-point throughput of 5.5 MB/sec (application level, using LAM 6.1)
for large (1MB) messages. This translates to
sending a double precision number each 1.45us.